When manually resolving directory conflicts isn't a feature

[Teemu Likonen]

On 2009-04-07 17:52 (+1000), Ben Finney wrote:

> Mary Gardiner <mary at puzzling.org> writes:
>
>> Answers along the lines of "you don't need that many directories,
>> surely" don't seem appropriate somehow. The tool should allow me to
>> create new directories in branches and switch back and forth easily,
>> and then my use of directories is between me and whichever
>> unfortunates have to work on my codebase(s).
>
> Bazaar certainly allows you to do this; better than many other tools,
> I'd say, since it treats directories as first-class citizens in the
> tree of versioned objects. So no, I don't think you need to adjust how
> much you make and remove directories.

Except that with Git, which does not version directories, there is not
this specific problem. Only files' content matters. When switching
branches, _ignored_ files (.gitignore) in the old branch are silently
replaced with versioned files (if any) with the same name in the new
branch. Unignored unversioned files obviously are not replaced
automatically; in such case switching branches fails unless forced.

I don't doubt that this can be fixed in Bazaar but implementation and
user interface is more complex because of possible directory conflicts.